Thus, the material covered on the Regulation section is always changing as well. Many candidates also find this section difficult because it involves a lot of memorization with very little logical connections. For example, there is no reason why the standard deduction is its current amount. The numbers do not lie, the hardest section of the CPA exam is most definitely FAR. With a 2022 Q4 pass rate of under 45%, it is a brutal section. When this is compared to the Q4 pass rate for BEC, which was a healthy 60%, it is clear that people are less successful with FAR.

Given the exam’s level of difficulty, knowing how to study for the CPA Exam is essential. As you prepare your strategy for how to pass the CPA board exam, know that a well-designed CPA Exam review course can be worth the investment. A review course will help familiarize yourself with both the exam’s content and its format and functionality. To compute, the US CPA Exam is hard, because there is a comprehensive amount of details covered on the exam and, with most examination courses, quite a plenty of study time is required. The best piece of advice I can give you to increase your score and CPA exam passing rate is to get a proper CPA review course and stick with it.

What is the hardest section of the CPA Exam?

This cost and scheduling can often be a large hurdle to finishing within the 18-month timeframe you are given. A common testing track is to begin with FAR, then do AUD and REG (in any order), followed by BEC last. This will allow a more natural progression that builds on knowledge previously attained. Continue exploring our CPA Resource Center or download our free Exam Guide.

In most instances, you would be better off simply retaking the exam. A vast majority of review requests and appeals are unsuccessful. The CPA exam is conducted in a meticulous and painstaking manner. A great deal of effort goes into ensuring that the questions for the exam are prepared and graded carefully.

What Makes The CPA Exam Difficult?

Over preparing will consume your time and can cause information to become dated as the CPA Exam changes. Within 18 months of passing your first CPA Exam section, you must have passed all four sections or you will lose credit for that first section. Then, you must pass any remaining sections and any section(s) you lost credit for within 18 months of the oldest section you still have credit for. This adds additional stress to every stage of your exam process. Managing this stress, creating a study plan, and adjusting your plans for setbacks is part of passing the CPA Exam.

We recognize there is an inherent bias to these results as students who do not pass may not share this information with us. Because the exam covers such an extensive amount of information, it requires a significant commitment in study time. It’s a worthy investment, given that CPA Exam pass rates are notoriously low.

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These figures can be daunting, but you shouldn’t be discouraged. CPA candidates don’t have to prepare alone, and our data shows that the right preparation can deliver a passing score for the CPA. Beginning January 10, 2024, the CPA Exam will consist of three Core sections (AUD, FAR and REG) and the choice of one Discipline section (BAR, ISC and TCP). The weighted combination of scaled scores is 50% MCQs and 50% TBSs for both Core and Discipline sections, with the exception of ISC, which is 60% MCQs and 40% TBSs.

• To test these skill levels, each four-hour exam section is divided into five testlets.
• Even when studying with most examination courses, about half of all CPA candidates have to retake at least one section of the exam.
• The current exam version will compel you to reach a greater comprehension of accounting topics by featuring questions that assess you for higher levels of knowledge and skill.
• You will spend approximately 30 times as long studying for the exam as you will actually spend taking it, so it can be tempting to shave that study time down to sit for the exam faster.
• We’ve seen candidates pass with as little as 80 hours of study time per section, and we’ve seen others need 180.

In actual practice, the number of correct answers that you provide only forms the basis for calculating your final score. Our CPA Exam Review is completely integrated, so all course components work together to give you a powerful and efficient way to get you started on your journey to becoming a CPA. Along with thousands of questions from previous exams to help you understand the content that will be tested, our Exam Review is designed to help you become familiar with the exam’s functionality.

This table indicates that the Auditing and Attestation (AUD) section is divided into two portions – Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and Task-based simulations (TBSs). The AICPA has verified that CPA Exam is not graded on a curve – but that’s not to state that it works in the same way as a standard examination. As you presumably know, each area of the exam is reported on a scale that ranges from 0 to 99 and to crack a section, the candidate must achieve a minimum of 75. After a dip in 2021, AUD scores continue to lag slightly from previous years, indicating the need for better preparation among exam-takers. Originally, the 19.5-hour-long exam was administered in five sittings over two and a half days, only twice per year. It wasn’t until the paper-and-pencil exam was discontinued in 2004 that the exam began to look like it does today.

Have you ever wondered how the AICPA calculates your CPA Exam section scores? It’s important to know that your total reported score does not represent a percentage correct, nor can you interpret it as such. When you fail an Exam section, you’ll also receive a Candidate Performance Report that assesses your performance on that specific section.

Regulation scores have been pretty stable over the past several years. This trend might be explained by the lack of information changes in the exam. Unlike FAR where additional IFRS information keeps creeping into the exam, REG consistently focuses on federal taxation. There’s a slight downward trend, but nothing that is too serious.

Our results make it clear that with the proper guidance, you can develop the skills and strategies that can help improve your chances of obtaining a CPA passing score. They also show that Becker is How Hard is the CPA Exam? And Why are Pass Rates Only 50%? the best review course to prepare you for the big day. For the BEC section, your total score is a weighted combination of the scaled scores from the MCQs, TBSs, and written communication tasks.

The score releases occur during different times of the year depending on candidates’ testing window. Each of the four sections has a time limit of 4 hours, so by the time you pass the CPA, you will have taken at least 16 hours of tests. You are given an 18-month window, starting from the date you pass your first section, in which you are able to take the remaining three sections of the test in any order you prefer. There are several factors that make the CPA exam one of the most challenging credentialing examinations.

Your task is to answer each of these questions to the best of your ability. But having a time limit means you’ll need to prioritize answering every question over scrutinizing each question individually. Each section has 12 pretest Multiple-choice questions and one pretest Task-based simulation. Furthermore, the Business Environment and Concepts section also includes one pretest written communication task. The purpose of using a scaled score is to make the score used for different versions of the CPA exam comparable. Therefore, it is possible to standardize the exam results by using statistical processes to calculate test scores that allow the results from different sets of questions to be compared.